THE Central American Economic Integration Bank (BCIE) on Tuesday gave state-owned Banco de Costa Rica (BCR) a $90 million credit line to be used to provide credit to small and medium businesses, municipalities and infrastructure projects of national interest.

This is the largest credit line BCIE has ever awarded to any Central American commercial bank, according to bank representatives.

The $90 million will be used for four purposes – $30 million to provide accessible credit to small and medium businesses, $20 million to provide credit for the purchase of raw materials and capital goods, $10 million to provide credit to modernize and buy new equipment for municipal governments and $30 million to finance infrastructure projects (roads and private energy generation).

“THIS is very good news,” said BCR President Victor Emilio Fernández. “This credit line will bring benefits to the institution and to the beneficiaries of the bank, especially small and medium businesses.”

Juan Rafael Lizano, director of BCIE for Costa Rica, stressed the importance of the loan in fostering the country’s development.

“This signing is very important for the bank and for the country,” Lizano explained. “It’s the largest credit line we have awarded to any Central American bank. It will bring a series of benefits to the country and the institution.”

According to Lizano, funds from the credit line will be loaned to BCR at 7-10% interest with six to 15 years for repayment.

Lizano praised BCIE’s policy of issuing credit lines to commercial banks. By providing credit for businesses, banks play an important role in economic development, he said.

BCR Manager Carlos Fernández stressed the importance of making credit available to local businesses, particularly if the U.S.-Central America Free-Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which Costa Rica finished negotiating last January (TT, Jan. 30), is approved.

“With the free-trade agreement coming up, it’s BCR’s responsibility to make funds available for the country’s small, medium and large businesses at very reasonable rates,” Fernández explained. “It’s unfair for foreign businesses that have access to credit at 3-4% to compete with local firms that receive credit at 7-8% (in dollars).”

Fernández said the loans would have a minimum of $2,500 and be awarded at interest rates between 17.5-21% (in colones), depending on the project’s risk and the debtor’s financial situation. The loans would be offered over five, seven or 10 years with grace periods of 12-18 months.

Those interest rates are competitive when compared to those of average housing loans, which are currently at 19%, he said.

HE claimed it was possible for interest rates to drop even lower, if the current trend of decreasing interest rates continues. Last year, BCR cut its interest rates by an average of 3.5%.

Requesting the credit line is part of BCR’s strategy to expand and grow during 2004. By the end of the year, the bank hopes to increase its assets from $1.7 billion to $2 billion, he said “One of our main objectives is to obtain long-term financing from international institutions,” Fernández explained. “We want to be evaluated by international financial-rating institutions and receive an investment grade so BCR can begin to attract funds on the securities markets of the United States.

“These funds will make is possible for the bank to keep growing and have long-term resources available to help businesses expand and continue contributing to the economy,” he said.

THE Association of Costa Rican Free-Zone Businesses (AZOFRAS) and the Foreign Trade Ministry (COMEX) are recommending that the corporate income tax under the proposed Permanent Fiscal Reform Package being studied by the Legislative Assembly not exceed 15% per year.

A higher tax rate, they claim, could cause the country to lose the comparative advantages it has over other countries.

Free zones are areas within a country designated as “outside customs territory.” Importers are allowed to bring foreign goods into free zones without having to pay import duties or taxes, pending the goods will be processed, shipped or reexported (TT, Feb. 27).

Approximately 190 businesses are located in the country’s free zones, and they employ more than 35,000 Costa Ricans, according to AZOFRAS.

FREE zones benefit from tax exemptions, including exemption from income tax during the first four years of operations here. During the next four years, the rate is 15% (half the current annual tax rate for corporations), and thereafter the rate is the same as it is for other companies (30%).

However, these tax breaks and other benefits will expire in 2009 once the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) agreement on subsidies and countervailing measures goes into effect.

AZOFRAS president Jorge Brenes on Monday warned that an annual tax rate higher than 15% could prompt investors to leave the country in search of more attractive destinations.

Costa Rica, in addition to lacking “the optimum infrastructure required to support foreign investment,” has relatively high labor costs, Brenes said.

“If a high taxation rate is added to these two factors, the country would definitely lose international competitiveness,” he added.

THE 15% tax rate was recommended in 2001 following a comparative study by the World Bank’s Foreign Investment Advisory Service (FIAS). The rate was formally proposed in 2002 by a commission of former finance ministers charged with offering solutions to the country’s fiscal deficit.

The original version of the fiscal reform package unveiled last December by a mixed legislative commission included an 18% corporate income tax. It remains unclear if that figure will be changed in the coming weeks as legislators debate and modify the plan (see separate story).

“As the institution in charge of defining the country’s investment attraction policies, we have expressed the need to take into account the tax rates of countries we compete with in terms of attracting foreign investment,” explained Gabriela Llobet, Vice-Minister of Foreign Trade. “We also consider it important to make sure free-zone businesses receive additional incentives that do not violate WTO agreements.”

THE proposed tax package includes a series of incentives and deductions for companies that provide their employees with valuable skills, operate in zones with relatively low development levels, use pioneering technologies and apply clean technologies.

“The only technical study conducted on the matter states 15% as the highest possible tax rate under which Costa Rica would remain competitive while generating additional revenues for the government,” AZOFRAS Executive Director Timothy Scott told The Tico Times.

“Other proposed tax rates lack the technical criteria of this study. We’re awaiting to see what will happen.”

Even though they consider the 15% tax rate optimum, AZOFRAS has said it would accept 18% as long as there are additional incentives that reduce the total tax burden.

IN related news, several government institutions last week unveiled a series of measures aimed at simplifying the requirements for free zones businesses to operate in Costa Rica.

The new measures, which have not yet gone into effect, simplify 20 of the procedures free zones are required to conduct, according to Manfred Kissling, Director of the Foreign Trade Promotion Office (PROCOMER). For example, businesses will be allowed to issue joint declarations for accumulated shipments of products they frequently import or export, instead of issuing separate ones for every shipment.

This measure in particular, Kissling said, will reduce the operating costs of businesses and the workload of customs officers.

THE measures aim to make filing paperwork faster and less cumbersome by allowing most of it to be filed electronically through PROCOMER’s Web site (www.procomer.com). Each business will be assigned a password to access the site and an electronic signature with which to conduct procedures electronically.

Kissling said he believes making procedures electronic provides government institutions with more tools to ensure freezone businesses are operating correctly and following the country’s laws. Information submitted on paper is difficult to access, store and use, he said.

Electronic information, on the other hand, is flexible and can be used in many ways, he explained.

GILBERTO Barrantes, Minister of Economy, Industry and Commerce, and the person in charge of overseeing procedure simplification programs, said the measures are a leap forward.

“In summary, these measures will create clearer rules, make procedures less discretionary and eliminate unnecessary requirements,” Barrantes explained. “Simplification benefits companies and the government. We will continue until the country offers fewer obstacles for investors and becomes a better place to invest.”

The measures are expected to be implemented through an executive decree reforming the regulation – an annex to a law that explains how that law is to be interpreted and applied – to the country’s Free Zone Law.

The reform does not require the approval of the Legislative Assembly and will go into effect after being published in La Gaceta, the government’s official publication, officials said.

SCOTT applauded the proposed measures.

“We could have tax rates of 0%, 2% or 3%, but if we continue to have a complicated web of paperwork and requirements, we won’t be competitive,” he explained.

Being able to file procedures electronically will save free-zone businesses a great deal of time, Scott said. Eliminating the audits they must conduct on their yearly reports, another of the proposed measures), might save free-zone companies anywhere between $5,000 and $20,000 a year.

PRESIDENT Abel Pacheco and Jamaican Prime Minister Percival J. Patterson, in representation of 14 members of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), on Tuesday signed the free-trade agreement between Costa Rica and CARICOM in the Jamaican capital city of Kingston.

“The signing of this free-trade agreement is a step forward in the effort to bring our peoples closer together, strengthen our human development possibilities and consolidate our national democracies,” Pacheco said. “… This treaty will be, for both sides, an opportunity to increase commercial exchanges and investment flows

and stimulate job growth and production.”

THE agreement is the first bilateral preferential trade agreement CARICOM has signed with any country. CARICOM’s members are Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago. Bahamas, an observer and not a full member of CARICOM, is not part of the trade agreement.

The treaty began as a bilateral trade negotiation between Costa Rica and Trinidad and Tobago in 2002. Negotiations concluded in March 2003, but the official signing of the treaty was delayed a year so that its texts could be adapted to include the rest of CARICOM.

For the treaty to go into effect, it must be ratified by the legislative bodies of Costa Rica and at least one of the CARICOM countries, according to the Costa Rican Foreign Trade Ministry (COMEX).

COSTA Rican Foreign Trade Minister Alberto Trejos called the treaty a “nice opportunity” for all parties involved.

CARICOM countries are the fourth largest destination for Costa Rican exports, after the United States, the European Union and Central America. Between 1995 and 2003, yearly Costa Rican exports to CARICOM nearly quintupled, from $14.1 million to $69.8 million. Since 1995, Costa Rican exports to the region have been growing at an average rate of 22.1% a year, according to COMEX.

CARICOM countries exported $16.7 million in goods to Costa Rica last year. Since 2001, Costa Rica has maintained a large surplus with the region (it exports more than it imports). The trade surplus in 2003 totaled $53.1 million.

Costa Rica’s main exports to CARICOM are glass containers, prepared foods, medicines, soaps and cooking equipment.

CARICOM’s main exports to Costa Rica are natural gas, aluminum sulfide, radios and televisions, according to COMEX.

UNDER the free-trade agreement, 95% of Costa Rica’s export products, including most of its agricultural products, will be able to enter CARICOM duty-free.

CARICOM countries are net importers of agricultural products. This greatly benefits Costa Rica, which per capita is one of the world’s largest exporters of agricultural products, Trejos said.

“CARICOM’s market, not only because of its nature, but as result of its proximity, constitutes a very attractive destination for our exports,” he explained.

Pacheco and Trejos noted the trade agreement would benefit both parties because most of the goods each one produces are complementary – the countries specialize in different types of goods, so there is little direct competition or threat of one country’s products driving another’s products out of the market.

“IT’S a negotiation in which both sides have won,” Pacheco said during the signing ceremony in Jamaica. “Costa Ricans have access to a market of 15 million inhabitants. You [the Caribbean] will have access to national market of 4 million inhabitants, which can serve the Caribbean nations as a platform through which to access the region of Central America, a market that has been explored little by the people of the Caribbean.”

Primer Minister Patterson was equally optimistic.

“The negotiations are done, the rest no longer depends on us, it depends on the productive sector,” he said.

With the goal of extending the commercial ties that already exist between Costa Rica and CARICOM, a delegation of Costa Rican business leaders accompanied Pacheco and Trejos to Jamaica.

“AS with all new markets, we have a great interest in entering this one,” explained Marco Antonio Meléndez, of processed meat cooperative Coopemontecillos. “It’s in our favor that Costa Rican products are well received here.”

Costa Rican businesses see CARICOM as a region ripe with potential opportunities. Orlando Rojas, president of the Federation of Producers of the Caribbean Region (FUPROCA), a Costa Rican company that sells edible tubers such as yuca, ñame, malanga and tiquisque – all products that will receive duty-free access under the treaty – held his first meetings with potential distributors this week.

“This is very important for us because it expands our business possibilities,” Rojas said “We are willing to explore this market and believe we have the potential to export here.”

TIME remains to see this year’s Orchid Exposition in the old customs house in Barrio La California, San José.

Until Sunday, March 14, orchid experts, fans and the plain curious can see the more-than-1,500 plants at the exhibit that began March 11.

The event, hosted by the Costa Rican Association of Orchidology and dedicated this year to President Abel Pacheco, has grown in its 34 years from the first exhibit of 147 plants in flower pots to the cultural and educational display that it is today.

Each year more Costa Ricans go for the diversity of colors, sizes, shapes and scents of the mounting number of orchids arranged in scenes such as country home, a garden wall or a forest lookout.

AN auditorium features videos and speeches over various flowery subjects and visitors can buy orchids, fertilizers, watering equipment and other supplies.

Apanel of 11 judges from the American Orchid Society will rate flowers in 48 categories.

Ribbons will go to the first, second and third place winners in each category and prizes will go to the best national cultivated plant, the best cattleya and non-cattleya hybrids, best miniature, best of certain breeds and the most original, most creative and most educational arrangements. After the national competition the judges will award 175 prizes in an international competition.

THE exposition is open to the public from 7:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday.

Entrance costs ¢1,000 ($2.35) and is free for students with uniforms, seniors and children. From the Iglesia Santa Teresita (in Barrio La California), the exposition is 200 meters north and 50 meters west; the sign in front reads ACO.

For more info, see www.ticorquideas.com, call 248-1623, 248-1041 or 223-6517.

FLAMINGO – Swiss-run, Italian-managed, German-owned, U.S. chain – hotels and resorts up and down Guanacaste’s coast offer an international take on Costa Rica’s beaches, and give some foreign visitors a sense of home away from home.

But for those who wish to immerse themselves in Costa Rica once they get off the plane, there is Club Bahía Potrero, on the waterfront 2 kilometers north of Playa Flamingo in the northwestern province of Guanacaste.

Owned and operated by Costa Ricans, Club Bahía provides all the amenities one would expect to find at an international chain in a similar price range. But general manager Joaquín Gamboa has not followed any formula in the development of the Club Bahía Potrero.

Instead, he has taken what he has learned in hotel management seminars around the world and turned it into his own uncomplicated vision – a small resort with excellent service, a clientele that is equally Costa Rican and foreign, and a commitment to the community that surrounds it.

SINCE opening a little more than a year ago, Gamboa has trained a staff of 25 to answer every need and wish of his guests. By hiring young Costa Ricans with little or no experience, Gamboa is able to mold them into the hotel’s ideal employees, he said.

Attention to service is further helped by the hotel’s intimacy. Twenty-four units range from standard rooms to the presidential suite.

“We are trying to promote small conventions for businesses and organizations, and can provide excellent quality to small groups,” Gamboa said.

With green trees and exotic flowers throughout, the hotel’s gardens attempt to mimic the nearby national parks. The pool, with a swim-up bar and attached whirlpool, offers an alternative to the ocean, which lies just beyond the hotel’s healthy lawn.

The hotel lies on a bay, which makes for great swimming conditions, especially for kids. However, after a day of wading, many guests are looking for more, which is why the hotel helps arrange tours to Rincón de la Vieja, Barra Honda and Santa Rosa national parks. It offers quad, jet ski and sea kayak rentals as well as horseback riding. Arrangements can be made for fishing excursions.

GAMBOA and the hotel have been actively involved in the effort to clean up the nearby Flamingo Marina, which is struggling to reopen after a government closure (TT, Jan. 24, 2003).

Although Gamboa boasts that some of his guests come to eat at the Club Bahía Potrero restaurant and are so pleased they end up staying at the hotel, some dishes on a recent visit were hardly the best of what traditional Costa Rican can offer.

However, Gamboa is sending his head chef to Brazil to study and work under one of the country’s top chefs of 2003, so improvements could be coming.

Gamboa also supports the local scene when it comes to entertainment. Over Valentine’s Day, local mariachi singer Elena Umaña and one of Costa Rica’s most popular cumbia groups, Calle 8, played in the hotel’s outdoor dining area.

All units at the Club Bahía Potrero have air conditioning and cable television. Stereos are also planned for every room.

Hot water is provided through a water heater; turning on the water heater requires locating a switch in the closet.

Gamboa claims the hotel strives to provide all of the amenities of a resort, with prices that are still accessible to both foreign and Costa Rican guests.

A standard room for four people with two double beds and a sofa bed is $100.

The same room with an interior terrace and whirlpool is $116. A villa with separate bedroom, three sofa beds, kitchen, living room and dining area, housing five people, is $178. Condominiums with two separate bedrooms, kitchens and living and dining areas, housing eight people, are $300. And the presidential suite with three bedrooms, four double beds, kitchen, living and dining rooms and a whirlpool, large enough for 10 to 12 people, is $698. All prices include taxes.

Prices May 1 through Nov.1 are 35–45 % less and during Semana Santa and Christmas slightly more. Discounts are also given for extended stays. Club Bahía Potrero can be reached at 654-4671; see also www.potrerobay.com.

GETTING THERE:

BY BUS: Buses to Playa Flamingo leave from San José at 8 a.m., 10:30 a.m. and 3 p.m., 5 hours aboard Tralapa (Calle 20, Avenida 3/5, 221-7202). From Playa Flamingo a bus leaves daily at about 1 p.m. for Potrero.

BY CAR: From San José take the

to the road to Santa Cruz over the TaiwanFriendshipBridge, continue straight through Santa Cruz to the Cruce de Belén. Take a left and continue past Huacas to an intersection and take a right toward Brasilito. Continue on same road after Brasilito about 2 km to a dirt road on the right, take the dirt road about 1 km, at an intersection, Club Bahía Potrero will be on the left.

BY PLANE: SANSA (221-9414) and Nature Air (220-3054) have regular flights to Liberia. Taxis are available from the airport to Potrero (about 45 minutes).

OSCAR

Espinoza’s songs have wriggled into that Twilight Zone of music where the roles of lyrics and instruments are reversed. In the world of modern music, where instruments compensate for what the lyrics lack in meaning, his songs are musical vehicles, almost sidebars, for his lyrical message.

The effect is exaggerated in the Costa Rican’s solo album, “Apuntes Vitales” (Vital Notes), which predominantly showcases just his voice, guitar and thoughtful poetry.

With those tools he has bored shafts all over the landscape of topics that harmonize with the acoustic guitar, mining themes of the natural world and the city, of birth, fear, rain and others and even those that do not belong to him – the struggle of the indigenous Maleku.

THE plight of the Maleku was the impetus for “Espiritus de Tonjibe” (Spirits of  Tonjibe), named for a Maleku village, San Rafael de Guatuso in the Northern Zone. Men in grass loincloths dart along wooded paths in the video that accompanies that song, also included in his CD.

The song is overlaid with the voice of Marvin Elizondo uttering mysterious phrases in bass tones, and it laments the loss of that culture’s traditions to the indifference of the young generation.

As an example, one of the verses is a testament as vivid as any of his lyrics to Espinoza’s transcendence of the dullness that mires the messages of other artists.

Spirits of Tonjibe

Forged of copper and mud

With fermented corn

With the machete and grain Legends of heroes and gods

By your paths of stone

Your memory will hopefully return

Spirits of the earth.

Mauricio González produced the video through his company Afta Films and is also filming a documentary of those from Tonjibe. Though Maleku land has been protected since 1974, he said, estate owners on the borders of their reservation have scooted their property lines into the reserve and have cut large chunks of the primary forest.

Now the Maleku are looking to ecotourism to ease their transition from dependence on their dwindling trees. For the last year they have performed rituals and dances for visitors and shared with them their way of life. Afta and the video decry the loss of those traditions and hope to publicize the predicament of the communities there.

THOUGH the company has not yet made a profit from the video, González said “we want to share the proceeds from the sale of the video with the people there, so future generations of Maleku and others can know of their traditions.”

Wilson Monera, a Maleku, has taken charge of the eco-tourism project and can be reached at 464-0443.

The hype from the video, however, should not eclipse the clout of the album’s other songs. The majority are the reflections of a man with his guitar, but he slips in a few harmonica riffs and, through the miracle of track mixing, he accompanies himself on the congas.

In concert the harmonica stand around his neck lends the impression of a Latin version of Bob Dylan. Mauricio Vargas bongs out his own invented rhythms on the congas and others that underlie the Latin-flavored music of the isthmus.

ESPINOZA says of his music: “they are songs from the soul, from experience, from someone expressing himself out of necessity.”

Espinoza will play at the Jazz Café in San Pedro on March 30. His disc is on sale online at www.suscompras.com. It and his first album “Semillas de Hermanidad” (Seeds of Brotherhood) with the group Abraxas are available at Servicios Digitales in Alajuela. For more info, contact Espinoza at 443-1685, e-mail oscarer66@hotmail.com, or see www.geocities.com/oscarcantautor/abraxas.html.

For info on the video or the upcoming documentary, contact Afta Films at 443-3443 or e-mail aftafilms@yahoo.com.

THE caller was a regular, with a slightly irregular request.

“Hocus-Pocus‚ by Focus?” asked Dave “The Dude” Scott, raising a silvery eyebrow.

He cradled the phone on one ear and scrolled through his computerized database of songs until he found what the listener was looking for. After a brief exchange, prompting his raspy, veteran smoker’s laugh, Scott repositioned his earphones and swiveled back to the control panel.

“You’re rockin‚ with the Dude,” he said suavely, leaning into the mike. “Up next: Weezer, with ‘Island of the Sun.’”

It was 9 a.m. Tuesday at “Real Rock” 107.5 FM, Central America’s first English language radio station, and Scott, who was there at its inception, had been broadcasting for three hours already. He sipped coffee and gazed out the control room’s plate-glass window, which affords a second-story view of the mountains in the distance and a Persian rug store in the foreground.

THE station broadcasts to 95% of Costa Rica with 5,000 watts of power from the western San José suburb of Escazú; it averages 50 callers an hour, and between handling the phones, Scott readied requests (classic rock, all English, no boy bands, no Madonna) and commercial spots (English and Spanish), as station employees began to file in and mill around the coffee pot.

According to Scott, 107.5 was founded in 1996 by Andreas Herb, a former radio newsman from Germany. When he came to Costa Rica, he discovered a radio audience of English-speaking ex-pats and locals in his adopted homeland. Four years later, he sold the station to Canadian Nicholas Shaw.

Scott (a ringer for Bill Nighy’s rock star in “Love, Actually”) is, like Herb and Shaw, a wanderer of sorts. A 62-year-old British native, he landed in San Francisco in 1969 lured by the Beat-poet mystique. He stayed for the music, working as a roadie, DJ, and booker for David Crosby and Maria Muldar.

He also ran a blues café, did time as a cabdriver and dishwasher, and took the requisite cross-country VW bus trek.

But the druggy excesses of the time, the deaths of friends and the decline of the music scene gave him pause.

“My American Dream went away,” he said ruefully. He went with it. A cousin who was working as wardrobe master for a film shooting in Costa Rica invited him to visit –that was 14 years ago.

ECHOES of Scott’s formative years are evident in 107.5’s office – hung with posters of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin – and in its programming. It broadcasts BBC World Service news three times daily, and follows the U.S. classic rock radio format, with CDs from Scott’s own collection.

Since March 2001, the station has shot up in ratings, reaching 4.6 in September last year in the 25-40 segment, not taking into account foreign listeners. (Top Spanish stations hover around 8 or 9).

Listener preference typically divides along cultural and generational lines: Most Costa Ricans and older North Americans, said Scott, gravitate toward the uber-classic (The Rolling Stones, The Beatles), and ’70s hitmakers, such as Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Doobie Brothers.

“Classic rock is where this country is kind of stuck at,” he explained, although a growing afternoon audience of Costa Ricans and younger North Americans favor newer bands, such as Coldplay, the Strokes, and Counting Crows.

Of course, there are always exceptions to the rules, added DJ Margie Flaum, and listeners tune in for various reasons.

“I had a teacher who called to request Billy Joel, because she was using it for a test. And people call to test you, just to see if you have something. We have tourists who listen and call to say, “We have this in the States – do you have it here?’”

And there are the regulars – the “Hocus-Pocus” guy, the “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” guy, and so on, who expect a certain amount of recognition.

“They call up and say, ‘Hi, it’s me and I wanna hear my favorite song.’” Flaum said, shaking her head as the other DJs nodded knowingly.

“REAL Rock” has a small staff, with a Costa Rican business side, but its DJs cover most of the English-speaking world and, like Scott, arrived at 107.5 in round about fashion: Flaum, a tanned, husky-voiced former New York ad agency proprietor, closed her agency and ventured south after a friend vacationing in Costa Rica broke an ankle and couldn’t be moved.

Tom Rollo, a long-maned Scottish native with a burly Northern accent, arrived in Costa Rica as an exchange student and stayed on as an owner of a Rolling Stones theme bar – with less than two months broadcasting experience, he is a recent addition.

The marriage of Tena Jackson, aka Tena the Queena, to a licensed sexologist livens up her 6-10 p.m. show. Ephraim Kawdlo, aka DJ Effie the Aussie (10-2 a.m.), rounds out the English-speaking diaspora.

The station has staged promotions with English-language acts (most recently the reconstituted Misfits), and the DJs, whose collective DJ-ing experience is fairly limited, follow international music news, and have strong opinions about what’s good and what their listeners will like.

“No normal person goes into this business,” Scott said, but for as far as he and his cohorts are concerned, “Real rock” still beats the real world.

Said Flaum, “We say what we want, we play what we want, and we have fun.” To request a song, call 228-2159 or 228-2167.

HEREDIA has a new English-language used bookstore. That’s good news, since the unfortunate closing of The Literate Cat in September. Brian’s Books is a little hard to find at first, but it’s just a half block east of the cathedral on the street heading east (toward the Universidad Nacional) inside a little mall and just behind Scott Englander’s chiropractic clinic.

The small size of the store is deceptive. It has room for 10,000 books, hard- and softcover, and owner Brian Smith plans to add used CDs and DVDs. The Tico Times is also sold there.

“We’re taking things one step at a time,” Smith says of his new venture. “We’ll see what the people want.”

There’s not much space for moving around inside the shop, which is full of books. But two big, roomy benches under the mall’s skylight and just outside the store provide a place to rest and read, and Smith is looking into an arrangement with a nearby restaurant for a coffee service to help patrons really feel at home.

PRICES are moderate. Smith promises to keep to the $1-$4 range with trades-ins, and to bring in “new” used books so patrons aren’t forever exchanging the same ones. Smith is from the Philadelphia area. He took time out from WestchesterCollege to work in a foundry and as an auto mechanic and returned to college to graduate in education with a specialty in social science.

He came to Costa Rica in 1997, met and married Ana Sandi of Escazú in 1998. He set up the bookstore last year because he has always been an avid reader. He said it was his first trip outside the United States, his first marriage and his first commercial venture. He and Sandi are expecting another “first” later this year.

THE store is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday – Friday, and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays. The area has a parking lot and street parking. For more info, call Smith or Sandi at 308-7098.

THOUSANDS of kilometers from the United States, the American Legion has found a niche in Costa Rica.

The Legion is composed of members who served in the U.S. Armed Forces during wartime. The organization lobbies U.S. Congress on behalf of veterans’ affairs, promotes patriotic causes and tries to play an active role in their communities through volunteer projects.

It has had a presence in Costa Rica since around 1920. Three posts are active in the country: in San José (Post 10), in the northern Central Valley town of Heredia (Post 16) and in the Southern Zone port town of Golfito (Post 12). Post 16 has about 25 Legionnaires, while Post 10 has about 40 members. While members of the two Central Valley posts often attend the same meetings, most functions are held separately.

HOWARD Singer, commander of Post 16, says membership has increased during the last few months, and as a result the Legion is holding more luncheons and social events and is attempting to get more involved here. He attributes part of the growth to Legion sponsorship of Health Visions, a plan that provides veterans a way to receive medical treatment and prescriptions and takes care of billing Veteran’s Affairs.

A recent luncheon held in honor of District of Mexico Commander Mark Walker and Vice Commander William Shetz was an example of one of these events. The turnout was good, with 26 attendees at the lunch. While waiting for the event to begin, members and their wives mingled about introducing themselves to members of other post and making polite conversation. Stories of family, individual post business and daily life dominated the discussion, as opposed to the war stories one might stereotypically assume.

Speaking to members, Shetz addressed the need for the Legion to play a larger role in Central America, saying one of the goals here should be to “get people to appreciate where we are and what we are doing.”

Becoming more involved in communities would bring the role that the Legion plays in Latin America to the attention of citizens here as well as the American Legion’s national office.

Members agreed. Ken Johnson said Post 16 has been looking at several potential projects in which it can get involved, including visiting U.S. citizens in hospitals or prisons here.

SINGER admits that running a Legion post abroad is different from that in the States, and that Posts are forced to improvise, as they don’t have set locations or meetings. Plans are under way to establish a location for all veterans, not just Legion members.

“This is more practical, as we have a more limited amount of vets here in Costa Rica,” says Singer.

Currently, the Legion is involved in several projects in Costa Rica. Post 16 works to help Costa Rican widows of U.S. servicemen, as well as their children, get the benefits awarded to wives of servicemen.

Members have also helped buy furniture for area schools and are looking to become more involved as the organization grows. In Golfito, the Legion has helped donate wheelchairs and eyeglasses.

THE American Legion Post 10 meets in San José (228-6014 or amlegionpost10@costarica.net). Post 16 meets in Heredia on the second Tuesday of the month (266-0089 or singerhoward@racsa.co.cr). Post 12 meets in Golfito (775-0567 or aerolanc@racsa.co.cr)